Telecommunications Merger Leads to New Foundation

January 25, 2001 | Read Time: 1 minute

By NICOLE WALLACE

The day after America Online and Time Warner completed their merger, the new company announced that the AOL and Time Warner Foundations would be merging as well.

The new AOL Time Warner Foundation will be based in New York and Dulles, Va. The fund will focus its giving in the areas of education and technology, the “digital divide,” the arts, and civic participation.

Steve Case, chairman of AOL Time Warner, will serve as chairman of the foundation’s board. Kathy Bushkin, a senior vice president at the company, will serve as the foundation’s president. Ms. Bushkin, with her husband, Arthur, created the Stargazer Foundation, an operating foundation in McLean, Va., that runs programs designed to help nonprofit groups use the Internet (The Chronicle, January 11).

The AOL Time Warner Foundation has assumed responsibility for Helping.org, a Web site created by the AOL Foundation in October 1999 that allows visitors to make online donations to more than 650,000 charities.

The foundation announced that it had finished tabulating the gifts made through Helping.org during the holiday season. In November and December, visitors to the site contributed more than $1.1-million to charity, bringing the total amount raised through the site to $2.35-million. The average donation during the holiday season was $207, compared with an average of $158 for the rest of the year.

To get there: Go to http://www.aoltwfoundation.org.

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About the Author

NICOLE WALLACE

Features Editor

Nicole Wallace is features editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy. She has written about innovation in the nonprofit world, charities’ use of data to improve their work and to boost fundraising, advanced technologies for social good, and hybrid efforts at the intersection of the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, such as social enterprise and impact investing.Nicole spearheaded the Chronicle’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts on the Gulf Coast and reported from India on the role of philanthropy in rebuilding after the South Asian tsunami. She started at the Chronicle in 1996 as an editorial assistant compiling The Nonprofit Handbook.Before joining the Chronicle, Nicole worked at the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs and served in the inaugural class of the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps.A native of Columbia, Pa., she holds a bachelor’s degree in foreign service from Georgetown University.